The landscape was the most esteemed genre of nineteenth-century American painting when European-trained Hermann Lungkwitz immigrated to New York in 1850 in the wake of revolution in Germany. By 1851 he left New York, home to America’s most admired Hudson River school painters, and settled permanently in the Hill Country of Texas, becoming one of the first artists in Texas to make a contribution to this genre. A photographer, impresario of magic lantern shows, and later, a draftsman and photographer for the General Land Office in Austin as well as a painter, Lungkwitz applied the Romantic tradition of landscape to the dramatic Hill Country, a new, developing region of Texas. Like other American landscape painters, Lungkwitz worked in his studio from a variety of sketches made on site, incorporating the unusual geological features and scenic wilderness of the Pedernales and Guadalupe Rivers near Fredericksburg into highly Romantic landscapes.

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.